Thursday, December 22, 2011

There is only forward, reaching-now, as is.
A past, unique bounty of human consciousness
Does not exist
Outside of synthetic construction.
Incomprehensible time; event as time,
Observed substrate of my pacing.

Observer.

What is an instant?
Conjure me infinitesimals.
When one dies there is no time, therefore there was no time.
“Was” – how to reckon this?

Beauty.

Pre-reflective experience is secret.
Bridges are crossed…
Dearest Hominini: Idaltu, Neanderthalensis, Homo, Sapiens
You’ve walked so far.
Which one of you thought of God?

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Among the rare and exceptional characteristics of the late Christopher
Hitchens, I found one in particular to be most remarkable: a robust ability to
rapidly and with brevity, marshal his pithiest thoughts with sharp verbal
reasoning, logic and precise vocabulary, while he was drunk. This uncanny
skill can appropriately be declared Churchillian and it was used with astonishing
success as he publicly debated strong opposing minds, each of which was
naturally advantaged with stone cold sobriety. One wonders what he might have
accomplished if he’d been able to put the cork in the bottle. However, and more
importantly, this surprising fact belies so much more about the man and what I
think will be his enduring legacy.

Hitchens was not a philosopher in the proper sense, nor was he a religious
scholar, though he skillfully used the broad landscapes of both these
disciplines at will and with great effect to make his sometimes-ferocious
arguments against belief systems he saw as deeply hazardous to humanity. A
literary scholar, humanist and raconteur, Hitchens made the public square the
locus of his redounding and pugnacious challenges to the status quo of
religiosity in America. British by birth, he made America his home, not as a
resident, but as a genuine citizen. In fact, he was a nationalist in the most
precise definition of that word and made it his business to argue on behalf of
the country he believed represented the greatest human potential in history,
much like Thomas Paine, a man he greatly admired. To some, he could be at once
brilliant and in a turn exasperatingly over the edge and dissolute as he was to
this writer when he lent his disputatious support to the invasion of Iraq.

“Hitch” would certainly relish a contretemps to make his atheist position
against the rabbi, theologian or preacher, something he was famous for, but his
particular lines of argument were not new and represented well-worn positions
from the old quarrel made by others as far back as David Hume. One could
respect his ability to quickly identify inconsistencies and paradoxes in the
faith position, but at the end of it all, at least in one view, the God or no
God propositions remained in qualitative limbo for the audience.

Where Hitch was most devastating, was in his critiques of particular faith
traditions - or, more correctly in his world-view - of organized religions. He
went to work like an engineer, identifying the clear fault lines and demanding,
on purely moral and ethical grounds, that these institutions be held to account
for what he saw as their undue and harmful influence in American civil life and
throughout the world. Whether it was acutely identifying circumcision as
genital mutilation and therefore abject torture of infants, or shining a light
on pervasive and unchecked sexual abuse of children by clergy on a massively
disturbing scale, he so dominated these debates that his opponents seemed
unable to make the case for the goodness possessed by their respective
traditions. To openly criticize Mother Theresa is an act so audacious as to
make one wonder, what kind of meanness the critic was imprisoned by. But to
actually attack a woman, esteemed throughout the world as the essence of
Christian virtue, is to engage in the bizarre. But this he did and he did it
relentlessly.

And as it turns out, Hitch had his facts straight.

On a trip to Vietnam in 2001, I met a woman from the International Mission
of Hope who had worked with Mother Theresa for a short time in Calcutta. She
recounted to me some of her disturbing experiences. Among these was the fact
that sick patients and dying patients (often mixed together despite the
presence of communicable disease) were not allowed access to doctors or to pain
medications. Only “presence and prayer” were allowed, despite the fact that
some patients were in a great deal of pain, while medical help was available
via aid worker organizations. The credo of Mother Theresa and her nuns seemed
to be that physical suffering was a gift that would bring people closer to
Christ. Pray over them and let them writhe in pain. The aid worker and her
colleagues were so disturbed by what they saw as the willful irrationality and
obstinacy of the nuns that they had to withdraw, lest they become complicit in
what was becoming increasingly like purposeful torture. No doubt these laboring
souls had good motives, but they must have been blind to the sadistic nature of
their ministrations.

It was Hitch who brought these and other disturbing facts
to the fore. But he also used this and other examples to make his more general
argument against religion: that supernatural belief systems are inherently
irrational, yet play a central role in moral reasoning and ethics in modern
societies, despite the fact that their premises are based on a Bronze Age world
view. Furthermore, he argued, some of these ethics enable and often justify inhuman
behavior. How persuasive his arguments were or will be with the general public
is not clear, but his presence in making them made all of the difference.
Despite long odds he appeared to relish the fight and he grasped the essence of
America’s First Amendment, as a right with responsibility attached to it,
better than most American-born citizens.

While Hitch will certainly be remembered as the mischievous raconteur and
colorful personality that he was, his lasting legacy might be that he forged a
stronger position for Humanism in America, so that others may take the
conversation further and deeper into our culture. Who the next Hitch will be is
probably the wrong question. To this writer at least, it is clear that
Christopher Eric Hitchens, like Thomas Paine, may not be replaceable. Clearly
Hitch would be in full agreement with H.L. Mencken who said, “The most curious
social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect
that religious opinions should be respected.” Touché.

It is not in the agreeing or disagreeing that we find progress, but in the
rethinking of our own strongly held or wrongly held views. Hitch wanted to move
us out of our comfort zones and bring sacred hypocrisies in to the light of
day. And in this I think he succeeded.